Building My First ML Data Pipeline: Three Days, One Deployed Dashboard, and a Lesson About Letting Data Drive Business Questions
I just finished my first complete machine learning project—a renewable energy investment analysis dashboard that's now live on Streamlit Cloud. Three days of work. 181,915 rows of data. And one really important lesson: your initial business problem is probably wrong.
I'm a software engineer learning ML with Claude designing my course. This project clarified a lot about how data science work actually happens.
I started with a plan: build a tool to help optimize fossil fuel plant modernization schedules based on renewable production patterns. Sounded reasonable. Turned out to be impossible with my data.
I had a renewable energy dataset covering 52 countries from 2010-2022. Six energy types. Good coverage. But after loading it into the interactive EDA dashboard I'd built the previous week, re…
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